


A Taste Like Snow, A Smell Like Smoke

by rei_c



Category: X-Men (Movies), X-Men (Movieverse)
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-06-03
Updated: 2006-06-03
Packaged: 2018-01-15 02:26:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1287805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rei_c/pseuds/rei_c
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She is the centre of a triangle, with three men surrounding her. Each loves her, differently and the same.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Taste Like Snow, A Smell Like Smoke

She wasn’t sure what woke her up, but here she was, lying in bed next to Bobby, the sound of his breathing the only thing breaking up the silence. Her heart was pounding hard, so hard it should have made noise, and did in her ears, but nowhere else. Bobby was dreaming, she could see his eyelids move back and forth, but she didn’t think that was what had—

There. There it was. The faintest pressure on the edges of her mind, sweeping, as if…as if someone was looking for her. Her eyes widened as she sat up, Bobby shifting, opening his eyes in bleary question. She told him to go back to sleep, and he nodded once, eyes closing again. 

Her heart was still racing. 

There was only person who had ever touched her mind like that, but he was supposed to be dead. Logan and Storm had come back and said he was dead, and they’d all been at the memorial. She’d been the first to lay her rose on the stone’s base. The Professor was dead, Jean was dead, the Golden Gate Bridge was in shambles and still someone touched her mind, touched without permission, took without asking. Before she took the cure, there was a limit to how long a telepath could hold that touch. Living with her power, her mutation, she’d tried so hard to compartmentalize it in her mind, to control it the way Bobby did, the way Storm did. It had never worked, only pushed her power deep inside her mind, the outer layer able to be touched for more than three seconds, six or seven, but never ten, and never her skin. But that touch had been there for minutes now, waiting for her power to kick in. 

It wouldn’t.

\--

One month later, and the only person she’d told about that touch was Logan. She’d been drinking tea at midnight while Bobby slept, and Logan had walked in scratching his stomach and yawning, heading for the fridge and a beer before he realised she was even there. He’d asked where Bobby was, of course, but he could see that they were growing apart and didn’t push the issue when she shrugged. She had thought it would be different, after the cure, but she’d lived too long without touch that feeling it now was so intense it almost hurt. It could have been Bobby, with his too-cold fingertips and his icy tongue, but she had the feeling that it would hurt with anyone, hurt the same as if Logan was stabbing her with his claws again. He’d caught her eyes on his hand, asked what was wrong if it wasn’t Bobby, and she’d told him, just like that, because it was always that way between them. She’d started crying, he’d muttered something, and then he’d come over and put his arms around her, raising an eyebrow at the brief electric shock. She’d cried for an hour, mourning the professor, Jean, her powers, the way everything had turned out, and she’d never felt safer than in his arms. 

\-- 

Two months later, and the X-Men received a cryptic letter from Moira MacTaggart. The touch on her mind came back, every so often, and hesitated, skipping off and on, skimming around. She felt it once, after a long respite, and tried to use her power to swat at the annoyance before she remembered she wasn’t a mutant anymore. 

But there was a faint buzz in her mind, and the touch left. She looked down at her hand, then up again, and ran through the mansion, screaming for Logan. 

\--

Three months later, and it’s obvious that the cure is only temporary. She fought her mutation as it reasserted itself, gaining an inch of control for every two she lost, but she can’t feel upset now. She had never had this much control over it before, could never hold it off before, could never moderate it before. All or nothing, before the cure, and now she has the slightest bit of control, as if her power is finally her own. She claims it with a laugh, and can’t stop even as Logan brings an extra bed to the room she and Bobby had been sharing. 

\-- 

Four months later, and her powers are back in full and then some. She sees the way Bobby looks at her, out of the corner of his eyes from his separate bed, and she misses him, the way his body felt pressed against hers when she woke up, but she can’t feel sorry. She realizes that she had missed her power, somewhat; grown too used to it for it to ever leave, and now that she can control it, even the slightest bit, she walks around the mansion, hair swinging, smiling. Logan smiles back, at midnight in the kitchen, at noon in the Danger Room, in the long summer afternoons. She thinks he understands a little, and it finally hits her that she never really understood before. 

\--

Five months later, and she is sitting outside, talking with Logan, when John comes back, a scorching heat the only signal before he is there, in front of her. She stands up, shocked, and he smiles the way he always used to, when it was just him, and her, and Bobby, the private little smile that says I love you, and I understand. She sees bitterness in his eyes, and then Logan rests a hand on her shoulder before leaving to go inside. 

She and John look at each other, silent, until finally she opens her mouth to speak but instead sobs, rushing forward and hugging him tight, so tight, as if she was trying to force him inside of her. But there is no spark of power in the touch, just joy and sorrow and welcoming, and he runs his fingertips down her cheek before she takes his hand and leads him inside to Bobby. 

\--

Six months later, and Storm is landing the plane. John is one side of her, Bobby on the other, ice and fire surrounding hollowness, and she feels complete for the first time in years, having her hot temper and her cool logic back beside her, filling her up. Logan is behind her, she can feel him there, feel his power, and she feels that cautious skittering over her mind again as the plane’s door opens. A man emerges that none of them recognise, but she can feel his touch, sense his power, and steps forward. She calls him Professor, and her two boys look at her like she’s lost her mind, but Logan behind her doesn’t, doesn’t react at all. 

The Professor smiles and greets them all, and dances around her mind while he does so. Her mind growls at him, echoes of Logan in the noise, and she laughs, echoes of Magneto in the sound, when he looks at her, first surprised and then calculating. Logan tenses, she can feel the power coiling in his every muscle, but says nothing. John crosses his arms, her Pyro is ready to burn, and Iceman on the other side is frozen, his mind cold and clear in a way the Professor’s won’t ever be. Storm doesn’t know where to stand, moves halfway between the Professor and Logan. Logan sees her move and smiles, showing his teeth and says that he’ll never let the Professor make the same mistake with her that he did with Jean, and her eyes flash when she sees the Professor take the hit, bowing his head, and Storm looks at each of them before sliding a hand up Logan’s arm and then turning to go into the school. The Professor has missed so much, unconscious in another man’s body; he will never understand what has happened to them all: to Jean, who died a goddess; to Bobby, who lost and found in ever-deepening waves; to John, who knew deep down that sacrifices were sometimes necessary; to Logan, who had only ever loved two women and killed one of them with his own hands. 

This is the way they greet him now, changed and reborn like him, in a way, like only each other, in a way. 

\--

Seven months later, and she is the centre of a triangle, three men she loves who love her differently and yet the same. Kitty watches her, when she can summon up the courage, fixes her eyes on three orbiting moons and the girl who is the sun in the middle of them all. Kitty watches and feels it hurt, and she can’t feel sorry for the girl, for the girl who tried to steal her Bobby and never liked her John and was always afraid of her Logan. 

\--

Eight months later, and the Danger Room poses no danger for them. She and Bobby and John are like one person in three bodies now, fire and ice and emptiness flowing between all three of them, until Iceman breathes fire, Pyro sweats ice, and she can do both. They can all three go numb, higher than heat, deeper than the cold, until even the Professor says there is nothing where they stand and Logan’s claws go through them like they are nothing more than dancing flames or falling water. 

She wears no gloves when she is with them, her two boys, because if she lays between them, body pressed against mind pressed against body, nothing happens save the slow spiralling descent into Heaven. She wears no gloves with Logan, either, though no one knows why, if it’s a side-effect of her drawing in his power and perhaps leaving some of hers, or if her obvious adoration is a dampener on any gift that might want to steal his life. They are the only three, and the Professor doesn’t touch her mind anymore, not after the last time when she’d stolen his power for a week after one split-second of contact. 

\--

Nine months later, and she can sense everyone in the mansion, every mutant in the country; sense their presence and their gift. And that is how she feels Erik approaching, leaving California and moving slowly through the mountains, slowly through the plains, turning and coming up north, to them. She tells Logan, who sighs, and she knows he will tell the Professor, Storm, the rest of the X-Men, but she is not there when Magneto arrives. Instead, she is curled between two bodies, hands thrown haphazardly over her, and content. 

\--

Ten months later, and Erik has stopped following her around with his eyes and his curiosity, stopped calling her their next great hope. She knows how he used Jean, how he hurt Logan and still toys with the idea of calling all Logan’s adamantium out of his body. She could feel him watching and knew what he was thinking, knew what she’d find if she just reached out with her power, and so she never did. She can feel him, sometimes, inside of her, a relic from that time so very long ago that lives in the same part of her mind as all the others she has touched. All of the others, except for Logan, who spends time with her everyday but not so much at night, anymore; except for Bobby, who still makes her roses of ice and sticks them to a frozen coronet, crowning her like a queen; except for John, who understands her silence and wraps it like a blanket around them, whose thoughts have somehow become her own, at times. 

Erik has learnt, though, that she is not their greatest hope but their greatest threat, a difference made clear to him when he found her inside with some of the younger children, using Bobby’s gift to freeze spiders, her gift to draw the life out of them, and John’s gift to burn them to ash. The children were pleased, but Erik had looked at her with those ancient eyes of his, so full of bitterness and pain even now, and recognised a weapon that was under no one’s control but who listened only to the three men who circled around her, and as his face paled, she had nodded, slowly. John had found her, then, coming up to rest an elbow on her shoulder, and the two of them watched in silence, together, as Erik left, retreated, when back to the Professor.

\--

Eleven months later, and Logan doesn’t saunter into the kitchen at midnight anymore. She knows, they all know, that Logan and Storm are sharing a bedroom and silent looks with a million words beneath, but when she sits and drinks tea alone in the witching hour she can feel two forces of nature colliding, can taste how thunderstorms might tame a wild beast in a way that emptiness and empathy never could. The two of them have taken over running the school, the Professor sitting in his office and trying to understand how everything had changed so much, and they don’t need to talk any more, Logan and Storm. And yet there are places of Logan that Storm can’t touch, that are too buried, too exalted, to be grazed by any other hand than one smooth and silky thanks to years of wearing gloves. Storm knows, and sometimes her eyes turn white when she sees Logan and her in the morning, talking without words on the balcony, but it is something the woman has grown to accept. If she wants Logan, she will have to deal with the small times of Logan’s infidelity. 

\--

One year later. She had forced her power out, but it had returned. She had given up John, but he’d come back. She had lost and regained Bobby, lost and regained him again. She had left Logan alone to kill Jean, but he’d forgiven her. She stole other power, stole life, and yet, somehow, when her hand pressed against the taut skin of her belly, she sensed another power there. Small, still forming, but it tasted like snowflakes and smelt like smoke, and every so often it danced with razor-sharp claws on the surfaces of her mind.


End file.
